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Before the Second World War came to pass, Byron (Barney) Rawson, then just a 22-year-old kid from the Northern Ontario town of Smooth Rock Falls, was being hailed as the “youngest Wing commander in the British Empire.”

Within a year, however, he’d be dead — not from the war on the European front, but from the war in his head.

On this Remembrance Day, as always, memorial ceremonies will crowd our cenotaphs — from the centrepiece in our nation’s capital to small towns across the country — where the names of the fallen and the long-forgotten are etched into weathered stone.

It’s the collective that is honoured year each, not the individual.

At McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., an honour roll tablet was unveiled more than a half century ago, bearing the names of the 35 McMaster graduates and undergraduates who died in the war that earned Barney Rawson a Distinguished Flying Cross and bar.

The list begins with Kenner Arrell, 24, a member of the 48th Highlanders who was wounded on Boxing Day 1943 and died a day later following an attack on a farmhouse defended by German paratroopers near the Italian village of San Tommaso.

And the list ends with Franklin Zurbrigg, age 25, his war coming to an end in England during a practice flight on Jan. 13, 1943, when the Hudson medium-range bomber he was helping to crew stalled on takeoff, crashed, and then burned.

Barney Rawson, son of a Methodist preacher, ended up in Hamilton when his father left an Ottawa parish to take the pulpit at the prestigious Centenary United Church, and signed up for the RCAF in 1940.

It was as if he was born with wings.

In the brief span of three years, he received promotion after promotion, and ended up serving as a commander in Bomber Command, the main offensive weapon employed by the Royal Air Force.

On the fuselage of his Wellington bomber — later dubbed the “widow maker” because of the high mortality rate of Bomber Command — was painted a portrait of popular movie star, Betty Grable.

“Our lovely girl,” he called her.

Barney Rawson piloted many bombing runs over Germany, once being shot up by “friendly fire” and, during one particular mission that claimed 16 Allied aircraft, he was hit by flak over the Ruhr but managed to limp his crippled aircraft back to England on one engine.

According to one crew member, the quote archived in a McMaster University file, Barney Rawson was a “pretty cool customer.”

On D-Day — June 6, 1944 — he was second pilot on a Lancaster bomber that raided the Paris railway yards to disrupt German troop and supply movement into Normandy and, later, this time in a Halifax bomber, completed a daylight attack, backed by fighter cover, on German defences and communications centres in the French port of Boulogne.

The Boulogne mission was his 32nd bomb run.

His final sortie, his 33rd, was part of a 600-plane raiding force in April 1945, a month before the formal end of hostilities, that was let loose to take out a strategic canal that connected the Baltic and North seas.

That’s when he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, pinned on him by King George VI himself, for “his courage and determination to press home his attacks despite enemy opposition.”

With that, Barney Rawson’s first war came to an end.

On Christmas Eve, 1945, the Hamilton Spectator reported the “shocking news” that their local war hero, Barney Rawson, had “died suddenly in the midst of his first peacetime Christmas.”

Only days later did the Spectator report his suicide, citing the cause as a “complete nervous breakdown.”

Today, those wars in the head are called post-traumatic stress disorders, or PTSD.

Then, it was called “battle fatigue” and, in some quarters, “lack of moral fibre.”

But McMaster University was ahead of its time.

In fact, it balked only momentarily back in 1945 before adding Barney Rawson’s name to the list of the

34 McMaster students who were killed in the war, and then had it etched into the Honour Roll tablet.

Lest he be forgotten for the war he helped win, if not for the war he lost.